Competing urban visions and the shaping of the digital city

Abstract

The definitive version of this article is published by Springer as: Aurigi, A. Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City. Knowledge, Technology and Policy 2005, 18(1), 12-26. COMPETING URBAN VISIONS AND THE SHAPING OF THE DIGITAL CITY Alessandro Aurigi School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK a.aurigi@ncl.ac.uk Paper published in (2005) Knowledge, Technology and Policy vol.18 n.1, pp.12-26 INTRODUCTION The emergence of the Information Society has been catalysing numerous changes within our cities and regions, as well as setting the scene for many projects that aim to enhancing the quality of urban life through the exploitation of new Information and Communication Technologies. The fact that ICTs can allow users to transcend, at least to a certain extent, the typical limitations in space and time of traditional lifestyles and working practices, is generating a growing interest for the social impacts of IT in our towns and regions, as well as for the opportunities that can stem from appropriate applications of these technologies. Making wide use of Information and Communication technologies could be seen as the new frontier of strategic thinking and planning in the 24-hour city, as providing and sharing information and services electronically seems a factor generating huge potential benefits to many aspects of urban life. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have started relying on exploiting new technologies and the Internet. City management is considering the benefits of electronically distributed services very seriously, as proved by the numerous projects developed in the past decade in many European cities. Democracy and participation to public life and decision-making processes could be enhanced by the fruition of virtual public spaces that allow both synchronous and asynchronous dialogue among citizens, and between citizens and administrators. To support these aims, several technological applications have been considered during the past few years, from traditional WWW sites and Usenet-like discussion areas, to smart card applications and ‘digital signature’ technologies. Implementation of online Geographical Information Systems for providing and sharing a wealth of spatial information has been surging, and more sophisticated ways to deliver place-sensitive information to wirelessly connected devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are being explored. For instance, the research and development work around the ‘3DspaceTag’ technology shows how new intangible yet three-dimensional electronic layers can be added to the physical city and its places, in order to augment them, accessing the information layer through an increasingly common – in Japan at least – GPS-enabled mobile phone (Tarumi et al., 2003). This paper is about the shaping of this increasingly ‘digital’ city that we live in, but it does not focus on the characteristics of the projects it is made of, and their contents. Instead, it tries to reflect on how its character can be affected by the visions and interpretations of what the city is, and of what role new technologies can play. In a way it is a reflection on processes, rather than contents, and on what underpins different approaches and configurations of the digital city. These reflections are based on the critical comparison of information from different sources, mainly case studies and literature on digital city related projects in Europe. Most of these analyses were carried out by several scholars, including the author, in the late 1990s, when the debate on embryonic digital cities seemed particularly alive. About all of the projects considered had been started and run not by city planners, but by IT officers, local politicians and bureaucrats, who ended up being the main informants in the investigations. These studies provide powerful insights on the different views and interpretations of the city – and its electronically augmented version – from the actors involved in shaping the initiatives. It is argued that these are now more than ever precious to make us reflect on the future trajectories for digital cities. THE ‘DIGITAL’ CITY